DISORIENTED BEES?
Thank you for your article in the May 14 Portland Phoenix, “Warning Buzz,” by Deirdre Fulton. My dad kept bees when I was young — 40 years ago. I always enjoyed being around them. They were none too easy to keep healthy, even back then. In the past few years I have been keenly interested in bee kills, which have frequently been reported. Sadly this seems to be more collateral damage of a society that seldom considers the real consequences — and costs — of its actions.

We traveled to Sicily in April and while there visited an apiary on the slopes of Mount Etna. The apiarist suggested that the real reason for the bee kills in North America was not being acknowledged — high-frequency cellular traffic so pervasive in our region. He believed the cellular frequencies were disorienting the bees and causing them to be unable to make a return to the hive. It’s my understanding that bees navigate by the sun. Who knows . . .

Nate Bemis
Amesbury, Massachusetts

PHYSICS LESSON FOR DIAMON
Newton’s laws of gravity and motion are universally understood laws, not subject to anyone’s opinion. Drop a bowling ball from the top of a building and the acceleration due to gravity will accelerate that ball at 32 feet per second squared: the speed of a free-falling object after one second is 32 feet/second. After two seconds, 64 ft/s, and so on. This is a fact, not subject to opinion.

Al Diamon recently insulted Dr. David Ray Griffin who gave a talk on the justification for the war in Afghanistan. Dr. Griffin is very much Al Diamon’s intellectual superior, but that didn’t stop Al from calling him an illogical kook (see “High Ideals, Crazy Dreams,” April 30). I burden you with the physics lesson because that is a certainty that convinces me Al Diamon is the illogical kook and his opinion unencumbered by Newton’s laws. I’ll explain.

The National Institutes of Standards and Technology (NIST) released a report in November 2008 describing the collapse of World Trade Center Building 7. It claims the building collapsed due to the failure of one critical column from fire, setting off a chain reaction involving all 82 supporting columns in the building. A high-school physics teacher, David Chandler, challenged that conclusion proving the free-fall collapse of that building. NIST had to change its report because of high-school physics.

Watching the roofline of WTC 7 in videos it is easy to measure that instead of a progressive failure of one column after another, the roofline drops all together at the same rate of speed as if you dropped a bowling ball off one corner of the roof. This means that in an instant there was nothing supporting the roofline across the entire building. The entire building fell straight down at free fall into its own footprint. NIST acknowledges free-fall but doesn’t explain it. The only plausible explanation for free-fall is controlled demolition.

Dr. Griffin supports the physics teacher and an investigation as to why the building collapsed in free fall. Al Diamon is entitled to his own opinion of the 9/11 truth movement, but not his own facts.

Three-city news war The Portland Press Herald is really under the gun right now, from within and without its walls.

WikiLeaks: What it means Only a day after three of the world's most-prominent news organizations — the New York Times , the Guardian , and Der Spiegel — published reports based on the 90,000-plus purloined secret Afghanistan War documents released by WikiLeaks, the US House of Representatives passed a $59 billion war-funding bill on a vote of 308 to 114, sending it to President Barack Obama for his signature.

Rough Seas Ahead Eighteen months after Barack Obama took office with the largest plateful of troubles of any president in recent memory, it would seem only fair for him to finally get a stretch of smooth sailing.

Buzz off Michael Steele, the imbecile chairman of the Republican National Committee (RNC), has gotten himself in trouble — again — with the party faithful.

Ramping up safe-drinking strategies It'll come as no surprise to anyone who was out and about during the long, hot, holiday weekend that Portland's drinking and nightlife scenes get a little bit more . . . intense during the summer months.

City Council on the cusp of change In Rhode Island's most dynamic political season in years, one set of intriguing races is getting short shrift: the Providence City Council contests.

DONE WAITING FOR PATIENT SAFETY | March 07, 2013 As an employee in downtown Portland as well as a resident, I've been exposed to a climate of escalating hostility surrounding the entrance to the Planned Parenthood of Northern New England offices.